In August 2016, flight attendants for United Airlines ratified a new contract that raised the top wage to over $71,000 per year. The deal provides pay and benefits that far exceed the standard for most jobs in the service economy. Whereas workers in restaurants and in big box stores can be forced into overtime at the last minute, United flight attendants get time and a half if they volunteer to work on busy days. Whereas those in retail and in fast food lose pay when business is slow, United flight attendants are guaranteed their monthly wage regardless of the demand for air travel. In an era when white men continue to out-earn other workers, the new United contract delivers a living wage to a majority woman workforce in which half of new hires are people of color.

Four decades of tireless organizing allowed United flight attendants to lock in these gains. Since the middle of the 1960s, flight attendants have been on the cutting edge of social change. In an era when most middle class white women married and had children right out of high school, flight attendants – or stewardesses as the airlines still called them – stayed single, married later, and delayed motherhood. Living in the downtown areas of major U.S. cities, many stewardesses joined the women’s, gay, and lesbian liberation movements, and helped transform dominant cultural ideas about love, sex, and kinship. As people’s attitudes about sexuality changed in the 1970s, however, the economy failed to keep pace with the social transformation. On the one hand, most people’s families began to look more like flight attendants’, with people marrying later, having children outside of marriage, or choosing same-sex relationships. But on the other hand, the ideal of the traditional nuclear family became ever more important to the political debates of the 1970s and 1980s as phrases like “female headed households,” and “out of wedlock births” became means to blame poor women – and especially women of color – for their poverty.

Rather than avoiding these heated cultural debates, flight attendants made ideas about family and about sexuality the centerpiece of their union agenda. They built alliances with LGBT and feminist groups outside of the industry, and argued that a living wage, affordable health insurance, and a secure retirement should not be reserved for white men in heavy industry and in corporate management. Flight attendants’ new movement was immensely successful, and real wages for flight attendants at many airlines doubled between 1975 and 1985.

While the category of sexuality galvanized flight attendants, it also became the centerpiece of management’s effort to challenge the flight attendant union movement. Business leaders in the airline industry – and among the Wall Street bankers who financed their operations – argued that a decade of rapid social change had undermined the values that had always made America strong. To alleviate the vast new economic pressures facing the middle class in the 1970s, managers pushed to restore those bedrock values: deferred gratification, personal responsibility, and hard work. Ordinary families’ stability, big business argued, rested on rolling back the cultural changes that flight attendants and many of their allies had initiated in the 1960s and 1970s. The new alliance between pro-business and pro-family activists presented a daunting challenge for flight attendants, and by the 1990s, unions at many airlines had been forced to forfeit many of their previous gains.

Deregulating Desire tells the story of this bitter conflict over sexuality in the airline industry. While it illuminates the challenges that flight attendants and all feminized service workers have faced as neoliberal reforms transformed their industry, the book shows that an ongoing commitment to feminist and LGBT activist movements has helped them maintain a heavily unionized workplace. As the recent victory at United Airlines demonstrates, flight attendant unions have delivered concrete economic resources for their members, resources that most workers – including much of the white middle class – lack in the 21st century. In an age when economic inequality is the centerpiece of national political debates, and when there is little concrete analysis of nuts-and-bolts efforts to fight economic inequality, Deregulating Desire documents flight attendants’ often successful struggle for workplace justice.

In 2015, 21 different anti-trans bills were put before legislatures in over 12 states. In the first 3 months of 2016, politicians have brought us another 44 bills in still more states. Most of these bills focus on public facilities that are sex segregated; most criminalize transgender and nonbinary people for using public facilities; most suggest that these bills are necessary for the “safety” and “privacy” of “the public;” most include a definition of “sex” as that determined by birth assignment and confirmed by birth certificate, and chromosomes. Many focus on public schools. In their rhetorical conflation of transgender with perversion and predation, and in their legitimation of excessive surveillance, they disproportionately impact people who are already most targeted: trans and queer people of color, trans women generally, and nonbinary people.

Whether or not they pass, these bills produce a climate of fear and suspicion, and they have already contributed to an increase in violence in and around bathrooms.

As a white transgender person who doesn’t “pass” well in either bathroom, I am more nervous than ever every time I need to use a public restroom (roughly 1,500 times a year).

These bills don’t originate from public concern or from any documented problem, and protests against them show that many people aren’t buying it. After all, trans people have been around forever, and there is no record of any trans person harassing anyone in a bathroom, ever. Plus, the bills themselves are staggering in their fantasies that sex could simply be flashed at the door with the wave of a birth certificate. Most people know that these bills don’t make bathrooms safe and only marginalize trans people, even making it impossible for us to use any bathroom.

We know we are political fodder. The GOP made a sudden “issue” out of our access to public facilities in order to galvanize a crumbling party. It wouldn’t be the first time the GOP has created a political platform around vilifying already-marginal communities. As John Ehrlichman explained in 1994, Nixon advisors designed the war on drugs in order to derail the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam Antiwar Movement. In the midst of the Cold War, the GOP also consolidated itself around anti-abortion platforms. And from the 1990s on, the GOP turned gay marriage into the fuel behind their campaigns rather than addressing economic and environmental crises.

But even more specifically, the rhetoric surrounding these bills relies on a very old trope of white women needing protection against sinister intruders. In Wisconsin during a 9 hour public hearing about its bathroom bill, we heard from quite a few men who didn’t want their daughter or granddaughter to be vulnerable to men preying on girls in the locker room. One said, for example, “we don’t allow exhibitionists and child molesters to hang out outside of school buildings, so how can we even be talking about letting them into girl’s locker rooms?”

North Carolina State Senator David Brock shared a similar concern in response to the state paying $42,000 for an emergency session to pass SB2 which criminalizes trans people for using public facilities: “you know, $42,000 is not going to cover the medical expenses when a pervert walks into a bathroom and my little girls are in there.”

Or we can look at the campaigns against Houston Proposition 1 during 2015. Prop 1 was an Equal Rights Ordinance barring discrimination in housing and employment on the basis of gender identity as well as sex, race, disability and other protected statuses. These are rights that should already be guaranteed under the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and elaborated by Title IX and the American with Disabilities Act. Refusing to affirm these rights, those who opposed the bill claimed that the bill would allow men into women’s bathrooms. They created TV ads depicting large dark men intruding on white girls in bathroom stalls. They rhetorically turned a housing and employment nondiscrimination ordinance into a “bathroom bill,” and they succeeded; Prop One failed to pass.

And let’s not forget that the North Carolina bill also contains unchallenged sections that discriminate against workers and veterans. Against the more graphic iconography of predatory men in women’s bathrooms, the rights and workers and veterans are easily lost from view.

This is not the first time that demands for equality across race, sex and gender have been resisted with the claim that public accommodations will become spaces of unregulated danger against innocence. The face of the intruder may change slightly, but across centuries, the victim is ever and always a young white girl.

It’s also not the first time we have seen white women used in the service of sexist and racist and transphobic violence. Feminist historians have conclusively shown that the 19th and 20th c. trope of protecting young white womanhood was foremost about securing white masculinity, domesticity, and white supremacy.

Though they cause real violences, these bathroom bills are not primarily about transgender people or bathrooms. Nor have lawmakers, for all their concern about young girls being molested in bathrooms, shown similar concern about the most common forms of sexual violence and assault against girls and women (across race) that take place outside of bathrooms.

As mean as these bathroom bills are, something much larger is also at stake. The North Carolina bill is designed primarily to strip the right of local municipalities to set their own anti-discrimination and protection laws.

We have lost all semblance of constitutional, democratic process.

These anti-trans tactics work because they succeed in directing fear away from the corporate demolition of democracy; they succeed by making people believe that the reason they are struggling and vulnerable is because some other group of people is dangerous and taking away something “we” worked hard to earn.

How, then, can we best address the fact that these bills increase everyone’s vulnerability and directly make the world less safe for people of color, people who are known or perceived to be trans, nonbinary, queer, or gender non-conforming?

While politicians vie for corporate favors at the expense of their constituents, and as more and more people struggle to maintain jobs, health, and life, we can still refuse to perpetuate hatred. Our only hope may be to refuse the rhetoric that pits people against each other. As politicians and corporations dismantle democracy, it is more crucial than ever to organize across race and class and ability, across queer and feminist and trans and straight; and to be brilliant in our resistance to cooptation.

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post Unbought and Unbossedauthor Trimiko Melancon’s blog entry for the Good Men’s Project entited, “Black People, Sexuality, and Myths of Homophobia,” which combats stereotypes of African Americans.

In the wake of last year’s Baltimore protests for Freddie Gray, black people challenged their mischaracterizations as “thugs” and “rioters.” These monikers, which came from various segments of the population and media, stigmatized blacks as inherently criminal, violent, and disorderly. While black men and women rightfully contested such labels, another one has circulated generally and goes largely uncontested as if it’s conventional wisdom: that is, the labeling of black people, particularly black men, as the most homophobic racial group—ever. (Or, in other words, the false idea that they are somehow the epitome of excessive fear, prejudice, hatred, or violence against gays and lesbians—or, pretty much the LGBTQ community as a whole).

Much like the racially coded labels “thugs” and “rioters,” exaggerated claims of black homophobia achieve similar false propaganda and dangerous stereotypes. They ascribe a backwardness to blacks, conflate them with excessive homophobia, and cast homophobia as a black phenomenon, while simultaneously minimizing other homophobic attitudes in our society.

We are, to be clear, in an era when the first-known black U.S. President, Barack Obama, endorsed same-sex marriage and is the first to use “lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “transgender” in the State of the Union address. Civil rights organizations and leaders—the NAACP and Rep. John Lewis, the late Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond and others—have publicly championed LGBT rights. Young queer black women founded the Black Lives Matter movement to protest state violence against black bodies (cis and trans), celebrate black humanity, and challenge anti-black racism.

And, black male hip hop artists from Jay-Z to Kanye West (whom Bruce Jenner credited for Kim Kardashian West’s acceptance of Jenner’s gender transition to Caitlyn Jenner) have expressed support and, in the process, challenged black men, black masculinity, and hip hop as viciously hyper (hetero) sexual, hypermasculine, and homophobic. As Jay-Z noted, “What people do in their own homes is their business and you can choose to love whoever you love.”

Why, then, do black men and black folks generally get such a “bad rep” regarding homophobia? And, why is there such historical oversights of their championing sexual liberation or gender fluidity as Jaden Smith has recently done in his modeling debut, in traditional women’s clothing, for Louis Vuitton?

This is not new. In fact, more than four decades ago, during the black power movement, Huey P. Newton—as supreme commander of the Black Panther Party, known for its conspicuously hyper-masculine and revolutionary black nationalist approach to liberation—expressed support for gay liberation. In his 1970, “A Letter from Huey to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” Newton asserted: “We haven’t said much about the homosexual at all and we must relate to the homosexual movement” and “must understand [homosexuality] in its purest form; that is, a person should have the freedom to use his body whatever way he wants to.” “Homosexuals,” he continues, “are not enemies of the people.”

So, surely some folks will suggest that black religiosity or organized religion accounts for excessive black homophobia. But, let’s be clear: these alone are shortsighted and do not quantify the myths. According to the Pew Research Center, 21% of white Evangelical Protestants and 41% of black Protestants supported same-sex marriage in 2014, while 13% of white Evangelical Protestants and 30% of black Protestants did so in 2001. Simply put, black Protestants’ support of same-sex marriage has been consistently higher than their counterparts. And, generational attitudes, religiously unaffiliated blacks, and other variables further debunk myths.

Why, then, we might ask, are there such historical oversights, limited representations (of black men and masculinity—and black women, too), as well as inattention to black people’s nuanced responses to and support of LGBTQ folks and concerns? And what are the underlying consequences?

When we sensationalize black homophobia or stigmatize black people as homophobic collectively, we not only stereotype black men and women; we neglect and do a disservice to black people’s complex history of advocacy for civil and human rights, gay liberation, and equality for all. Second, we condition ourselves to accept, justify, or normalize hatred and deadly violence against black gay, trans, and queer bodies like Michelle Vash Payne, Ty Underwood, Monica Roberts, and others whose names and murders we seldom know.

Equally problematic, we ignore the contours and realities of homophobia in America—the same dynamics and realities that account for NFL players like Odell Beckham Jr. having to contend with derogatory gay slurs or vicious invectives when he dares to dance with men, don honey-blonde-dyed hair, or refuse to deny himself or be encumbered by rather limited constructions of (black) manhood

We cannot afford to be uncritical, blind sighted, or to accept homophobia or heterosexist sentiments in any shape, form, or variation; nor can we succumb to the hype of black homophobia. When black people are called out of their names and labeled the epitome of homophobia, we should be as offended as when called “thugs” or other racially-charged insults. And, we should respond in similar fashion as when black bodies—male or female, young and old—are targets of attack and violence: whether in a crowd in Chicago, on a bicycle in Baltimore, atpool party in McKinney, Texas, or on a playground in Cleveland, Ohio.

After all, the fact of the matter is simple. Stereotypes and labels are not innocuous. They are far from harmless. Not as long as they have the power to color perceptions, invoke slurs, incite brutality and compromise one’s safety, or to cause black and LGBTQ folks their very lives.

The book examines the contemporaneous emergence of sexual science in Europe, Asia, Peru, and the Middle East between the later nineteenth century and the period leading up to World War II. It brings together literary and cultural scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists whose contributions cover topics ranging from the history of frigidity to ‘third sex’ culture in 1920s Berlin and the development of the sexual sciences in Russia.

Many of the contributors first met at an international, Wellcome Trust funded symposium I organized in 2012. The event was prompted by the realization that while we know that many of the founding texts of the sexual science in nineteenth-century Europe were multilingual as well highly intertextual, we still know relatively little about the global travels of ideas and people that shaped modern sexual debates.

For example, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, a founding text of modern sexology first published in German in 1886, is famous today because it popularized words such as homosexuality, sadism, and masochism. Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries drew inspiration from literary and scientific works to coin this new vocabulary. Sadism, for instance, was indebted to the books of the Marquis de Sade. A new project led by Kate Fisher and Jana Funke at Exeter University examines the cross-disciplinary ‘invention’ of sexuality.

Sexology and Translation in turn explores the textual and interpersonal avenues of exchange by which sexual ideas migrated across linguistic and cultural, as well as disciplinary, boundaries. Psychopathia Sexualis, for instance, was translated into a host of other languages including English, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian, and Japanese. Within the German text itself, Krafft-Ebing rendered sexually explicit passages in Latin, ostensibly to make them inaccessible to lay readers. That this strategy was unsuccessful is indicated by the proliferation of literary and cultural references to Psychopathia Sexualis – Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), the trial of which prompted the first public debates about lesbianism in England, mentioned both Krafft-Ebing and his legal predecessor Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. The Well of Loneliness was itself prefaced by a foreword written by English sexologist Havelock Ellis, indicating the close, albeit complex, links between literary and sexological cultures at the time.

Images such as the photograph of the man in a pink tutu, which was found in Krafft-Ebing’s estate, further reinforce that the development of sexology was not constrained solely to the scientific realm.

The collection examines the processes by which ideas were formed and transmitted across the modern world. It deliberately uses the formulationacross the modern world – in place of, say, transnational or global history – to define its scope. This is not to deny the usefulness of either of these critical perspectives – a summer institute on the global history of sexualityat Dartmouth College has shown that much is gained from framing the research in these terms. However, the collection’s subtitle seeks to emphasize the queer allegiances of the work presented here. The word ‘across’ – which can be defined in terms such as ‘not straight’, ‘askance’, and ‘at odds’ – resonates with the ‘traversing’ and ‘twisting’ which, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famous observations, is a conceptual characteristic of ‘queer’.

This association fittingly describes the aims and scope of the book. For while only some of the chapters directly engage with queer theory, all of the contributors look across boundaries, glancing sideways, backwards, and ahead as they expose the similarities in the way sex came to be discussed across different parts of the world between the 1880s and the 1930s.

Translations of Sex

Some of the chapters analyze the translations of certain sexological texts, revealing, for instance, that Psychopathia Sexualis was selectively adapted by the American anarchist John Henry Mackay to support a pro-homosexual stance; that the modern German concept of love is indebted to literary translations of Darwin’s evolutionary theory; and that the Japanese feminist movement found inspiration in the ideas of the English poet and reformer Edward Carpenter.

But the book also shows that translation is not merely a name for the one-way traffic of ideas. Where many previous studies have focused on the emergence of sexology in central Europe, several contributors here chart the coeval emergence of sexual science on the borders of Europe and beyond, discussing sexual debates in Russia, China, Egypt, Palestine and Peru.

This scholarship complicates assumptions that sexological ideas were transmitted from Europe to other parts of the world. For instance, the chapter on feminist debates in Peru shows that inward-looking debates about society were at the heart of gender debates on the nation. The essays on Chinese sexology in turn suggest that it was competing indigenous and international influences that shaped modern ideas about sexuality in that country. One of these essays further considers how ideas about China informed European views on sexual history. It reveals that Foucault’s arguments about the Eastern ars erotica were derived from a scholarly misreading of Chinese sexual culture, which, via, Foucault, was transmitted back into Western culture and thus became influential in the way Western scholars historicized sex.

A Suicidal Encounter

My own contribution on the writings of Jewish sex reformer Magnus Hirschfeld indicates that attention to translation between languages can also offer glimpses at the elusive evidence of past emotions and the circumstance in which they are formed. Hirschfeld is best known today for his homosexual rights activism, sexual intermediaries theory, (which is considered an early conceptualization of trans) and his founding of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin. I found that he was also a chronicler of the suffering of women and men who were attacked and ostracized because their bodies and desires did not conform to social norms and expectation. He mentions, for instance, the experience of a man from Philadelphia whose doctor had told him that homosexuals should ‘better commit suicide’. Hirschfeld includes these devastating words in English in the German text, bracketing them to distance himself from the incitement to suicide – even as he alerts readers to the complicity of certain medical discourses and certain doctors in perpetuating violence against homosexuals

It was this passage that first alerted me to Hirschfeld’s little discussed writings on homosexual suicide, writings which reveal that death and suffering as much as affirmative politics and cultural production shaped the emergence of modern queer culture.

Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World is full of new research that shows that new critical and scholarly insights can be found in translation. In the short time since its publication, I have already been contacted by several people who work on the emergence of modern sexual sciences in parts of the world not covered by this project. The book is thus also a beginning, the start of an ongoing dialogue about the history of sexuality.

This year Temple University Press received a dozen honors and accolades for its books, authors, and publishing program. We are pleased (and humbled) to be recognized by so many scholarly associations. Below is a compilation of the awards we received during the 2015 calendar year.

Press Award:

Temple University Press was especially pleased to be selected by the Association of American Geographers to receive the AAG Publication Award for 2016. This prize is conferred in recognition of exceptional and outstanding contributions to the discipline by publishers. It read:

At a time when many smaller university presses are shrinking, Temple University Press has distinguished itself by its continued commitment to and excellence in publishing insightful, thorough, and well written scholarship and research in Geography and Urban Studies.

The relationship between the Temple University Press and the discipline of geography goes back to the founding of the Press in 1969. Since that time, the Press has continued to publish important and innovative work on current social issues. Their publications in geography are focused on urban, political, and human geography.

Today, the geographic works published by the Temple University Press are recognized with major awards from a wide variety of organizations. Two recent publications in geography were awarded the “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice Magazine. Urban Studies titles have received awards from major academic and professional organizations in Anthropology, History, Sociology, Urban Studies and Planning, among others.

For their long-term commitment to publishing excellent research in geography, we honor Temple University Press with the AAG Publication Award.

Erica Ryan’s Red War on the Family (Temple 2014)argues that the first Red Scare–the backlash against and anxiety about domestic and foreign radicals–and its organizational progeny not only deeply shaped the American political world of the 1920s but also fundamentally affected ideas and practices of sexuality and gender, marginalizing feminists and sex radicals. Ryan analyzes the rhetoric of antiradicals who assailed the left (“Bolshevism”) by counterposing an “Americanism” which they built in large part on a conservative patriarchal vision of sex, gender, and marriage. She traces battles of post-suffrage feminists and antifeminists, efforts to reinforce masculine authority through a homeownership campaign, Americanization programs run by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and others by settlement house progressives, including fascinating early sex education classes, and popular debates about the “marriage crisis” and companionate marriage. She demonstrates the interplay and overlap of antiradicalism, antimodernism, and antifeminism as forces that pervasively connected the realm of the intimate and familial with the arena of formal political activity, tightly linking the personal and the political. In this she suggests that 1920s conservatism foreshadowed the New Right’s use of sex and gender as an organizing tool since the 1970s.

Christina Simmons: You focus your study on the rhetoric and conceptual framework of Americanism, especially the part centered on sex and gender. Obviously, we can never really separate the discursive and the material, but could you reflect on what social forces allowed this conservative discourse about family to carry so much weight? What were the material sources of power for these views? Was familial rhetoric more effective than formal capitalist economic ideology when appealing to ordinary men? In a culture already imbued with reverence for the family, were these popular responses as important as economic and political power, in making the sex and gender aspects of Americanism so salient and so culturally formative?

Erica Ryan: American conservatives responded to the Russian Revolution abroad and upheavals at home by advancing a self-consciously gendered and sexualized politics that they called “Americanism.” These conservatives enacted social programs and a cultural agenda that sought to stymie domestic radicalism and blunt the impact of feminism and sexual modernism, and they did so using language that fused family and patriotism. If we think of heterosexuality as a modern social and political system established in the 1920s, then analyzing conservative activism during the first Red Scare gives us insight into the institutions and actors that helped lay its groundwork.

Americanism shaped the culture of this era because of the sheer complexity of the conservative consensus, because it managed to encapsulate economic and political concerns even as it focused the local and intimate anxieties of a more popular audience. The social forces animating this movement were numerous. In addition to Red Scare antiradicalism, Americans struggled with nativism against immigrants, the fight over internationalism and the League of Nations, the dislocations and conflicts of the Great Migration, a tidal wave of labor unrest involving more American workers than ever before, the arrival of modernism in American culture, a veritable moral revolt among middle class youth, a growing birth control movement, and of course, the suffrage victory for women. In bearing the impact of these social forces, I do think Americans wished to embrace something that seemed stable, and familiar. Popular contributions to Americanism developed in part out of this desire. Both these popular responses and top-down influences carried the movement forward, giving it substance, so both were equally important.

At heart, this book argues that the salience of the antiradical argument depended on those ordinary men seeking authority in the family. It was the very use of sexuality and gender in configuring antiradicalism that made disparate and confused issues seem cohesive, enabling the widespread acceptance of conservative ideas in the 1920s. Ultimately, this facilitated the maintenance of a range of conservative social and political conventions that may seem distant from discussions about sex and gender.

CS: Do you have any reflections on how important ordinary people’s familial and sexual lives actually were (as conservatives believed) to “social stability”? In other words, were the conservatives right in a way–or at least smart!–to make these connections?

ER: I do think conservatives were smart to make these connections, for a few reasons. While radicals in the 1920s employed urgency and fiery rhetoric, conservatism struck many as more passive. By linking political conservatism to a notion of moral emergency, conservatives fostered powerful links between social stability, gender and family norms, and the political status quo. Also, American fears about family stability were not new in the 1920s. But in this decade conservatives crystallized an antiradical political ideology, one where an apparent family crisis reflected larger political, economic, and social concerns. Stable, heterosexual, cohesive families with breadwinner fathers at the head would, many conservatives felt, maintain a vulnerable moral and political order. The conservative position in the 1920s—and again in the second half of the twentieth century—charged families rather than sound social policies with the tasks of minimizing childhood poverty, assimilating maladjusted individuals, containing labor unrest, lowering crime, and tamping down social and political discord. We still see this position in American political culture today.

CS: Nancy Cott argues in Public Vows that in the nineteenth century marriage served as a form of governance for a (white) population spread out across a vast country with as yet few established governmental institutions. By the early twentieth century society needed marriage less for that purpose, and, she argues, the overt connection of “monogamous morality to political virtue” declined, and the state “concentrated more on enforcing [marriage’s] economic usefulness.” You make a strong case that, at least for proponents of Americanism, the link between monogamous patriarchal marriage and political virtue remained strong. Should we see the proponents of Americanism as fighting a rearguard popular action, while the state (in some ways at least) moved on to less strictly moral approaches?

ER: The shift Nancy Cott describes provides a crucial backdrop for the story I tell in this book. As society began to need marriage less as a form of governance, sexual modernism permeated middle class culture. And, with the Russian Revolution, Americans began to see communism as a threat to family life, to marriage, and to morals. Americanism served in part as a backlash to all of these developments in a charged political culture.

I do think we can situate proponents of Americanism as players in a rearguard popular action against the shifting public framework of marriage, something that was well underway by 1919. But it wasn’t only coming from popular actions. It is worth noting that one of the government agencies directly implicated in the development of this brand of Americanism, the Department of Labor, did similar work with their Own Your Own Home campaign. This national effort to boost home ownership amongst working class men positioned monogamous marriage and family life very purposefully as bulwarks against Bolshevism in both moral and economic terms.

In 1920, when women won the right to vote, conservatives responded by vaunting the political role of women as wives and mothers defending the hearth and home from the evils of Bolshevism. These proponents of Americanism directly sought to limit the liberatory potential of the suffrage win. They crafted and publicized—in the name of national defense—a restrictive citizenship role for women. And by the late 1920s, many feminists, including Democratic committeewoman Emily Newell Blair, wondered aloud about women’s apparent failure to impact the world of politics after 1920. We can attribute this “failure” to several things, including the very significant breakdown in organized feminism, and the antiradical attack on activist women. But this book argues that it was also due to the way Americanism framed women’s place politically as within the confines of monogamous marriage and motherhood. In so doing, conservatives self-consciously advanced a gendered and sexualized political worldview under the banner of Americanism. They sought to stem the tide of change by boosting this sexualized and gendered Americanism, and in the process they blunted the real impact of the suffrage win.

CS: I wonder about the difference between antiradicals like the Daughters of the American Revolution and progressive settlement workers. The former’s programs seemed to address how to run a household–styles of cooking or means of hygiene whereas the settlement workers actually took up gender and sexuality concerns more, as in the Young Women Christian Association’sInternational Institute’s commission to study second-generation girls or the United Neighborhood Houses’ intriguing 1927 sex education programs, which included some very liberal and even radical readings. Did the DAR focus on household work because it found many immigrant families actually conservative enough already on sex and gender? The settlement workers, on the other hand, wanted to convey more liberal attitudes, especially on gender, even though they also hoped to confirm marriage as the appropriate way to organize personal life. Were the antiradicals and the settlement workers really doing the same things?

ER: This tension between conservative reformers and the progressiveswas a surprising development in my Americanization research. While I thought their approaches and intentions would be quite different, it seemed important to me to acknowledge that in fact, both the Daughters of the American Revolution and progressive groups like the International Institutes and the United Neighborhood Houses sought to create orderly American bodies, that their efforts at heart were projects of cultural conformity in support of the developing social structure of heterosexuality. But, within that effort, as you point out, they were not doing the same things. And that is true in two significant ways.

First, they had vastly different views on the conflict between old world culture and new world culture. Conservatives like the Daughters of the American Revolution sought to impose what they saw as a superior American culture upon immigrants. Progressive reformers firmly committed themselves to the prospect of blending old and new world cultures. As proponents of the cultural gifts movement, many progressives celebrated old world customs even as they helped immigrants develop an appreciation for those of the new world.

Second, and perhaps more significantly here, these groups employed different frameworks for reform. The Daughters of the American Revolution’s efforts were focused on creating homogeneity within the material culture of the home, throwing over old world foods, hygiene practices, and homemaking styles in favor of American ones. And as you noted, they may not have gone further because they were satisfied with the family structures they encountered in immigrant households. But however conservative immigrant families appeared to be on issues of sex and gender, immigrant daughters served by the DAR undoubtedly struggled with shifting sex and gender norms, with the clash between a modernizing American culture and their old world influenced homes. And progressive reformers built a framework for reform around this reality. Leaders in the United Neighborhood Houses recognized the unique alienation of the “second generation girl” in 1920s America, and worried that a morally rudderless immigrant youth might completely devalue marriage and family life. They acknowledged the role sexual modernism might play in young people’s assimilation—that point needs to be made.

Yet, in this decade where heterosexuality was being established, I was struck by the fact that both conservatives and progressives fostered a different-sex, monogamous, marital model as the only desirable way to organize personal life. The Americanization effort was in many ways about solidifying popular understanding of American ideals, and heterosexuality as a social system was one of them.

CS: In your final chapter you document how antiradicals attacked women reformers, rebellious youth, and marriage reformers as abnormal and/or as Bolsheviks. On example was the famous Judge Ben B. Lindsey, proponent of companionate marriage. Your research adds a useful perspective on the story told by historian Rebecca Davis about the intense hostility to Lindsey and his ideas in the 1920s–you show the attacks on Lindsey as part of the wider antiradical campaign. But why did the conservatives focus on him rather than people with more anti-marriage agendas?

ER: This is a compelling question, and one that challenged me in my research for the book. I anticipated many direct attacks on sex radicalslike V.F. Calverton, a reformer, author and editor from the Old Left, but I did not find them, despite the fact that he celebrated the idea of ending monogamous marriage. Calverton overtly applauded Soviet policies as models of a better way, for example, in relation to illegitimacy laws. In an essay collection he co-edited on the “intimate problems of modern parents and children,” he exposed the hypocrisy of capitalism’s influence in determining the status of children as legitimate or illegitimate. “Life acquires value not because of its life, but because it is connected with the matter of property and its transmission,” he argued. “The illegitimate child is scorned, and the unmarried mother stigmatized, because they are a menace to our social order. They strike at the economic foundation of our whole system of morals and marriage.” “In Soviet Russia,” Calverton was quick to point out, “there are no illegitimate children.”

So, given this radical challenge to capitalist and marriage ideals embedded in Americanism, why did antiradicals instead go after Lindsey, whose “companionate marriage” scheme in many ways served only to reinforce monogamous marriage? There are a few things to consider. Lindsey’s support for birth control within companionate marriage was indeed still “radical,” and polemical. Lindsey’s book became a symbol for the sweeping concerns many Americans felt about youth culture, the “marriage crisis”, and radicalism more broadly. The press covered The Companionate Marriage and its contents constantly. Lindsey was well known, certainly more widely known than Calverton and his peers, and when antiradicals attacked Lindsey, it was intelligible to a broader swath of the American public. Conservatives considered him as perhaps a more legitimate (and more worthwhile) target because he proposed a model based entirely in reality. The sexual and social order promoted by Calverton seemed fantastical to many, yet Lindsey called for reforms rooted in changing realities. And indeed, by linking those real changes to Bolshevism, antiradicals hoped to discredit them.

We can read these reactions to Lindsey as part of a sweeping impulse toward reaction in the 1920s. The conservative consensus responded to change by touting tradition, both in personal and political terms. Whether they agreed with it or not, by the end of the 1920s many Americans understood that Judge Ben Lindsey’s name reflected fears of radicalism just as much as Vladimir Lenin’s. Popular understandings of Americanism and Bolshevism created in 1919 developed this connection, while a host of influences sustained it: politicians’ pronouncements about the capitalist family, newspaper and magazine articles about the dangers of women and radicalism, the push for homeownership amongst working class men, a range of Americanization efforts focused on the young, and a perceived crisis in marriage and family life.

In this fraught political and cultural moment, long before the New Right advanced a politics steeped in family values, the conservative consensus made gender and sexuality central preoccupations in their construction of 1920s Americanism. Their activism set the stage for subsequent conflicts over feminism, sexuality, family formation, and reproduction. Scholars need to attend to this history because, then and now, this kind of politics prioritizes monogamous, different-sex marriage and stable family life as the cornerstone of national strength. Sometimes plainly, and at other times imperceptibly, this political logic canonizes the patriarchal family as a social unit, marginalizes women as actors in the political arena, and reinforces the power of heterosexuality as a social and political system.

Christina Simmons retired in January 2015 as Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. Her 2009 book, Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press), addresses the transformation of the ideology of marriage and women’s sexuality for white and African-American women in the first half of the twentieth century. Her current research focuses on African Americans, sexuality, and marriage education in the 1940s and 1950s.

Erica Ryan is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Rider University in New Jersey. She is the author of Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare (Temple, 2014). She is in the beginning stages of two new projects: one examines fatherhood in 1990s American political culture, and the other links contemporary American “culture wars” to the political, social, and cultural divides of the 1920s.

Out in the Union: An Interview with Miriam Frank

Out in the Union (Temple University Press, 2014) by Miriam Frank tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. This book chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s and how these struggles continue to the present day. Frank documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities, organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers. Drawing from 100 interviews with LGBT and labor activists, Out in the Union provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests.

Katherine Turk: The subfield of gay and lesbian history has existed for more than three decades. Why do you think it has taken so long for scholars to write queer labor history?

Miriam Frank: The field of LGBT history includes many studies of queer working-class communities but very few investigations of the actual work lives of queer working-class people in those communities. Traditional labor history considers the everyday lives of working-class people at their jobs in terms of unionization, job mobility, and racial, ethnic and gender segmentation in the workforce. Queer workers and queer issues have not been a topic.

Before the 1970s, this made sense, because LGBT workers rarely revealed their queer identities on the job or in their unions. But customs have changed. In Out in the Union, I show how workplace cultures, community standards, and union traditions have influenced the ease or difficulty workers experience as they come out at work and in their unions. Contemporary explorations by union activists about working class lives and queer identities have led to LGBT-oriented reforms in organizing drives and collective bargaining, in union service programs, and in politically effective labor/community coalitions.

The US labor movement has a great history of strong political coalitions that have pressed for reform on economic and social problems. I wanted readers to consider how LGBT trade unionists developed alliances to apply their organizations’ principles and resources to queer union members’ economic status, basic civil rights, and workplace cultures. The successful LGBT coalitions that first emerged in the 1970s continue today, influencing collective bargaining priorities, community organizing, regional politics, and trade union ethics.

KT: Your book is organized thematically and chronologically; much of the narrative unfolds through case studies that illuminate the issues that have faced gay unionists as they pursued economic justice and the right to be open at work. Why do you start the book with a timeline?

MF: Out in the Union narrates untold stories of queer labor based on more than 100 oral histories that I recorded between 1987 and 2010. The collection’s scope follows diverse industries, unions, communities, and political events and ranges through more than 50 years of US labor and LGBT history.

A wise reviewer of the manuscript suggested that this complex narrative of communities, organizations, and events could benefit from chronological markers. I made a timeline based on occasions from the larger narrative that would contextualize political issues and decisions that shaped unions and queer working-class communities during that important half-century. I wanted to highlight locations, conflicts, alliances, and negotiations to demonstrate the astonishingly uneven, yet consistently dynamic diversity of these two movements.

KT:You make a strong case that queer and labor histories are intertwined. The years you chronicle saw the expansion of queer civil rights and the contraction of labor rights; as queer identities have become more accepted, working class identities have declined. Do you see any causal relationship between these dynamics or are they merely conterminous?

MF: My book begins with the mid-1960s, before gay liberation emerged as a mass movement. Unions then represented approximately 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. Public and service-sector unions were organizing successfully and their gains offset declines in union participation in the private manufacturing sector. Those losses stemmed from manufacturers’ decisions to shift operations to regions where lower wage rates prevailed and “right-to-work” laws disadvantaged labor’s goals.

During this same period, public opinion on queer civil rights began to favor reform, especially in liberal urban centers – and in states where union drives could not be stopped by right-to-work sanctions. These congruencies are neither causal nor coincidental. Rather they indicate politically liberal values: the acceptance of sexual variance in civil life and the encouragement of fair work rules in economic policy.

One early marker of the growing acceptance of queer civil rights was the 40-year-long state-by-state elimination of anti-sodomy laws in 36 states, by ballot or by judicial decree, a trend that began in 1961. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas struck down the anti-sodomy laws of the fourteen remaining states; of those fourteen states twelve maintained right-to-work statutes.

Declines in union membership have steepened, but without real losses in working-class identity. The harm, instead, is economic. Former union members still hold jobs, sometimes two or three, often as part-timers, often at or close to minimum wage. Their positions are precarious: they hesitate to challenge managers about unsanitary and unsafe working conditions, undependable schedules, and scarce raises. An ever-stronger corporate class with ever more consolidated political power threatens the security of working-class people and their unions as well as the hard-won gains of queer communities.

On April 15 of this year, queer and straight skilled laborers in highly-paid unionized jobs rallied in shopping malls and downtown plazas throughout the country. They were joined by queer and straight fast-food workers, big-box store workers, adjunct professors, home health care aids, and others who labor in underpaid and underrepresented jobs. I went to the demonstration in midtown Manhattan. People were demanding a raise in the minimum wage and an end to union-busting harassment during organizing drives. It seemed to me that while decline in union membership remains a serious issue, there is no dearth of people with working-class pride who would gladly reverse the situation.

KT: The book opens with the story of Bill, a covert trans man who worked as a locomotive engine repairman and rose to a leadership role in his union in the early twentieth century. How does the history of transgender workers relate to that of gay and lesbian workers, thereby rendering the more general term “queer” useful for labor history? How have transgender workers’ priorities been incorporated or downplayed within broader labor struggles?

MF: Bill’s fragmentary story of survival and transformation fits in with what little we know about transgender lives a century ago; and his union involvement is unique during an era when transgender working-class people had few options for survival. Some lived openly as outsiders; others would quietly pass. Rarely were any of these experiences recorded.

Decades later, transgender people were active in homophile and early gay liberation movements. But as gay liberation entered the political mainstream during the mid-1970s the strategy shifted from radical confrontation to a lesbian/gay civil rights agenda. Two issues emerged, both of them popular and possibly winnable: legal sanctions to halt sexual orientation discrimination and legalization of domestic partnerships. Anti-discrimination policies were included in unions’ constitutions in the early 1970s and the first collective bargaining agreement to protect domestic partners was ratified in 1982. Lesbian and gay advocates in the labor movement based their claims on union principles as old as the labor movement itself – an injury to one is the concern of all. Absent from the civil rights dialogue was any mention of gender transition or expression.

Nevertheless, transgender workers of the 1960s and 1970s found recourse from straight workmates and union representatives. At one auto plant, a worker who was in transition from male to female suffered hazing from co-workers and supervisors. Her local president broke up the worker-to-worker harassment, then helped her file a lawsuit against the company.

Unions first adopted constitutional resolutions on transgender workers’ rights to equal protection late in the 1980s and then confirmed those rights in their contracts. But not until the late 1990s did any workplaces prioritize health benefits and gender expression as rights specific to the lives and needs of transgender members. A few unions have followed that trail, but many others have yet to highlight transgender workers’ claims in contract negotiations.

Queer progress in the US labor movement has never been easy, but lesbian and gay union members have seen basic civil rights and economic benefits move steadily forward, especially since the mid-1990s. By contrast, transgender union members continue to travel a road that remains remarkably uneven. Now is the time for all queer unionists and their allies to support transgender activists as they press for a trans-friendly bargaining agenda. Their demands can shape improved contracts that will at last address head-on their basic needs: to earn their livelihoods free of harassment, protected from discrimination and supported by good wages and fair benefits.

KT: The second of the book’s three sections emphasizes the significant and often unlikely coalitions among queer and other workers and between queer activists and unionists. But did you also encounter evidence of notable tensions or fissures (sexism or transphobia, for example) within the queer labor community?

MF: Political cultures of the labor movement are actually different from the cultures of many identity-based civil rights organizations. To say it plainly, healthy unions operate with a primary ethic of solidarity when they work with activists from the ranks and with coalition partners from allied organizations.

This is not to say that expressions and issues of sexism, homophobia or transphobia do not exist in the ranks or in leadership. But from my interviews I have consistently found evidence of LGBT union members supporting one another in organizational decisions and working out their differences in frank dialogue. At best that openness flows from the union hall to the workplace and back again. LGBT union members who have come out have usually found fair-minded allies among straight and cisgendered co-workers: on the job and in their organizations

Often what sealed that respect was the willingness of LGBT activists to join in the projects of their unions. Everyday tasks, focused planning, and casual conversations gave people paths for productive collaboration. Queer people were seen less as outsiders and more as compatible volunteers; the energies of new activists lightened everyone’s loads.

That second section of the book consists of two chapters about the politics of coalitions. Labor/queer coalitions have been important to the health of both movements because queer communities, like unions, continue to deal with real and destructive political threats. Both have found reliable allies in one another in national, regional, and local struggles.

I have seen union meetings where waves of mistrust greeted new ideas. But way more often than not, labor’s essential ethic of fairness and equality has made a vibrant difference: “United we stand, Divided we fall — An injury to one is an injury to all.”

KT:Do labor unions still serve a vital role for queer workers, and, if so, is their need greater than other workers’? Given labor’s precarious position in today’s political and economic landscape, should queer activists continue to pursue the union-building strategies you uncover in Out in the Union? Or should they instead intensify their efforts to boost protections for queer identities in more visible and professional workplace settings?

MF: Out in the Union shows how unions and queer communities learned to collaborate during a critical 40-year period. During that time, unions were being diminished and weakened by multiple waves of deindustrialization accompanied by right-wing pressures against gains achieved through collective bargaining. And yet the US labor movement has managed to survive.

Currently, unions represent 11 percent of employed people in the US, a sure decline from the high point of 35 percent in the 1960s. Still, in 2013, 11 percent of the number of people represented by unions was 14.5 million. Estimates of how many people in the US are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender vary widely, but if we say 5 percent, we still have 725,000 workers; and that’s not counting partners, spouses, parents, and children impacted by the economic security of their queer family members.

Professional workplaces are increasingly unionized. Adjunct and graduate student campaigns have been popping up on dozens of campuses. Nurses’ unions have been mobilizing aggressively to address current transformations of U.S. health care. And unionized opera singers and orchestra musicians at New York’s Metropolitan Opera made headlines in September 2014 by winning their contract battle just ahead of the annual opening night gala. That fight was professional and militant and community support was very, very gay.

KT:For its subject, scope, and source material, your book is pioneering. You note that the book is not intended to present encyclopedic coverage or to serve as the last word on its topic. How do you envision your book as a platform for future scholarship? What related study would you most like to see next?

MF: Out in the Union has already served as a research base: for a chapter in a doctoral dissertation in 2014 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, by Sara Smith (on efforts by teachers and their unions to defeat the Briggs Initiative of 1978 in California); and for a senior honors thesis at Columbia University by Jared Odessky on union activity during the notorious Anita Bryant “Save Our Children” campaign in South Florida in 1977. It will be influential in graduate studies and down the line could provide a base for other sophisticated projects. I am aware of two graduate seminars being offered this summer that will use Out in the Union as a core text, and I have been invited to speak to one of those groups.

There are a number of paths that scholars could take. Projects that focus on single industries or on a particular region would offer more intensive research opportunities than the structure of my project permitted. I am thinking on the order of two very challenging and wonderful works: 1)Anne Balay’s Steel Closets (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), a fiery and focused study of 40 queer unionized steelworkers, most of them employed at the U.S. Steelworks in Gary, Indiana. 2) Phil Tiemeyer’sPlane Queer (University of California Press, 2013). I have disagreements with Tiemeyer’s exclusive study of gay male flight attendants, but I do admire the book’s dedicated and unswerving focus on the actual work that these men perform.

Earlier this year I posted a NOTCHES entry, Organized labor, Gay Liberation and the Battle Against the Religious Right, 1977-1984, and became acquainted with Bob Cant and Brian Dempsey, both of them veteran British labor activists. They mused on the dearth of historical review about gay/labor organizing in Britain and the absence of queer consciousness in British everyday life. They discussed the possibility of a British trade union oral history project. This would have to be a huge devotion, but what opportunities that material could offer!

And now, a last word about archives: the Out in the Union oral histories, files, and related organizational materials of the Lesbian and Gay Labor Network have been deposited at New York University’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives in the main Bobst Library. Some scholars have already been working with what is available. By summer’s end, 2015, the entire trove will be available to the researching public.

Miriam Frank received her Ph.D in German Literature from New York University in 1977, where she currently is Adjunct Professor of Humanities. She has taught Labor History in union education programs in New York City and in Detroit, where she was a founder of Women’s Studies at Wayne County Community College. Her book, Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America(Temple University Press, 2014), chronicles the queer lives of American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013.

Katherine Turk is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Turk has written numerous articles on postwar feminist politics and the challenges of defining and creating sex equality in the workplace, in the law, and in American culture. Her forthcoming book, Equality on Trial: Sex and Class at Work in the Age of Title VII, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in early 2016.

Photo: Katherine Turk and Miriam Frank at the “Fighting Inequality” Conference of the Labor and Working Class History Association and Working Class Studies Association, Georgetown University, May 2015. (Photo courtesy of Desma Holcomb.)